MarketingSherpa Blog

The solution's complexity also affects the business buying cycle

One way to look at the Business Buying Cycle is to break it down into stages. There are lots of potential stages and we can talk about those stages later but let’s keep it simple for now and just use these five:

1. Connect Stage: for generating demand by helping a prospect connect a business problem or goal with the possibility of a solution
2. Validation Stage: for validating the worthiness of that expression of interest into a priority project
3. Investigation Stage: for doing a deep dive on one or more solutions in order to figure out what to do
4. Purchase Stage: for picking the right solution and negotiating the right deal and terms
5. Operational Stage: for implementing or using the solution

Calls-to-action in the form of particular pieces of content should align with these stages. In other words, you need a hypothesis of the stages of the buying cycle and a hypothesis of the content that maps to each stage.  If someone responds to content in a stage, marketing can use the interest in that content to score the level of interest higher.

By using this approach, B2B companies can use a call-to-action that is appropriate within the overall content marketing effort and extrapolates interest in the offer based on the stage of the buying cycle, testing and iterating to a more efficient demand generation and lead nurturing strategy

In this blog post, I will focus on four of these stages.

Connect Stage

When generating demand early in the connect stage, companies should use credible (often third-party) information about the business problem solved by their particular solution.

For example, research might reveal that problems with sales forecasting drive purchase decisions for sales force automation (SFA) software. To take advantage of this information, an SFA vendor might contract with a company with an industry reputation for providing credible information on sales forecasting best practices to write a white paper on sales forecasting, perhaps based upon field research.

On the other hand, if research revealed that chief financial officers (CFOs) were the individuals feeling the pain of faulty forecasts, perhaps a paper by a brand more familiar to CFOs would be more effective. In other words, B2B companies should keep in mind the target community when developing the call-to-action offer strategy.

Validation Stage

In the Validation stage, the offers need to perform a slightly different job. In this case, the responder has expressed an interest in the problem.  Now the offers need to validate the worthiness of the solution so that it becomes a priority:

• A case study
• An exercise to assess the potential return on investment
• A webinar that features a current customer with a well-known brand
• A report by an industry analyst (e.g., the Gartner Group in the computer industry)

Response to each of these offers indicates a higher probability of purchase than the initial response to an offer about the business problem.  In other words, it’s predictive of purchase intent. Again, interest in these content offers would result in a higher lead score.

Investigation  Stage

In the Investigation stage of the buying cycle, customers are generally ready to speak to sales.  Offers in this stage can identify those customers and prospects.  For example, a prospect may want to develop a request for proposal (RFP) to send out to a short list of vendors under consideration. As such, an RFP template (biased to the solution of the vendor) might be very useful to the prospect and even highly predictive of an increased likelihood of purchase.

Likewise these calls-to-action will also indicate the customer is prepared to speak with a sales representative:

• Implementation guides
• Technical white papers
• Competitive guides
• Evaluation software
• Total cost of ownership exercises
• Other similar content

All of these relate to the concerns of customers and prospects entering into a deeper investigation of a particular solution.

Purchase Stage

Once the buying cycle has reached the purchase stage, the sales channels should primarily deliver call-to-action offers. Purchase stage offers include discounts on a product or a service, and sales representatives can use these types of offers to win deals and to expedite the purchase process. These offers should be left to the judgment of salespeople and their managers in order to avoid unnecessary discounts.

Across the entire Business Buying Cycle, vendors can also include generic offers such as sweepstakes or free merchandise to generate demand, and move prospects toward a decision. One thing to keep in mind, is unlike the more targeted calls-to-action, these offers are not as predictive of future purchase behavior.

Related Resources

Free Web clinic, March 30th — Converting Leads to Sales: How one B2B company generated $4.9 million in additional sales pipeline growth in only 8 months

B2B Marketing: The FUEL methodology outlined

MECLABS

How and When to Use Content in the B2B Sales Process (Members library)

B2B Marketing: Relevant content must move beyond “glitz” and tell a properly sequenced story

Content Marketing: How to get your subject matter experts on your corporate blog

When I was on the phone with Stacey Epstein, VP of Marketing, ServiceMax, I remembered some advice I heard when researching our first article for MarketingSherpa’s Inbound Marketing newsletter.

I spoke with a lot of great experts for that piece. On content marketing, I spoke with Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute. He mentioned that marketers should avoid publishing too many types of content and focus on about three that fit their strategies.

“But you have to do one really well,” he said. “You have to do an awesome blog or the best e-book program that’s ever been run; focus on what you can do really well, better than anyone else in your industry.”

That is exactly what Epstein and her team are striving for with SmartVan. ServiceMax launched the site in January as a content portal for the field-service industry (which is served by ServiceMax), to help companies that send technicians out of the office for service, installation, and repairs.

“We noticed there was a complete lack of resources for these people,” Epstein says. “The site is meant to be a place for field-service professionals to educate themselves.”

Site traffic has grown faster than anticipated. After a just a few months, SmartVan holds the top Google rank for the phrase “field service news” and about 15% of its traffic comes from natural search.

“It’s great for us to be ranked so high so quickly,” Epstein says. “I think it’s a testament to how little content there is out there. It helps validate that we’re helping to serve this huge need.”

Weave the brand into the content

Epstein has big plans for SmartVan and hopes to continually grow its traffic for several years. One key principle is to avoid selling ServiceMax too directly, she says. Otherwise visitors could write-off the site as a marketing channel rather than a trusted resource for industry news.

“We’re really trying to create a resource for field-service people that doesn’t exist today… We feel that we’ll have a lot more success in getting people interested in the site and wanting to be on the site if we don’t try to sell them.”

The team does plan to incorporate ServiceMax into the site, but will do so carefully, and mostly around content. For example, a ServiceMax webinar on how the iPhone is changing the industry will be mentioned on SmartVan.

Also, a company blog written by ServiceMax executives will soon be hosted on the portal. Epstein also plans to offer an email newsletter to help build a database.

“We’ll never have a homepage that says ‘SmartVan is brought to you by ServiceMax. Go see us now and buy from us,’ etcetera. That’s not our intent.”

Content creation: easier than thought

A website that’s designed as the go-to resource for a specific topic cannot afford to have stale content. When planning SmartVan’s strategy, Epstein wondered how her team would keep up with the demands of a daily publishing schedule.

But that challenge has been easier than anticipated. The team has partnered with LaunchSquad to help manage the site and has pooled content from a variety of sources.

“We found some great contributing writers who were super interested to join us. We certainly contribute content from ServiceMax. We have a couple of guys from LaunchSquad contributing, and we aggregate content from other sources,” Epstein says.

“Between all those different people, I’m actually blown away by the amount of content. We’re serving up multiple pieces of fresh content every day.”

Changes and hurdles on the horizon

Epstein has promoted SmartVan with a press release, an email to ServiceMax’s house list, and mentions in Facebook and Twitter. She’s hoping the site will continue to grow through word-of-mouth and natural search.

A key challenge to growth, she says, will be connecting the field-service audience and encouraging visitors to interact. SmartVan will soon offer social features in hopes of fostering engagement, but this will be a pioneering effort for the industry.

“Right now, this is not necessarily a super tight-knit community,” Epstein says. “Part of that is because there isn’t a lot that brings them together. There aren’t a lot of trade shows, and there aren’t a lot of online forums.”

But that challenge is also a huge opportunity. SmartVan could become a powerful marketing channel for ServiceMax if it continues to grow at its current pace.

“If we can succeed in building this community and creating a place where all these people can go, interact and get educated, it will by far outpace any other traditional marketing strategy that we ever could have done and at a much, much lower cost and with fewer resources.”

Related resources

MarkteingSherpa’s free newsletters

Inbound Marketing: How to pull-in customers without pushing ads

Content Marketing: How to get your subject matter experts on your corporate blog

Content Marketing: Should you lure a journalist over to the ‘dark side?’

Email Marketing: Maybe it really is an inbound tactic…

Members Library – Content Marketing: Microsoft crowdsources content ideas with a viral contest for new Windows Phone 7 platform

How much money do you make?

For whatever reason, that’s a question most of us never ask our peers. It’s such an uncomfortable topic to discuss. Yet, you’re curious, aren’t you? And well, you should be. How can you benchmark your salary without knowing what other VPs of Ecommerce, Search Engine Marketing Analysts and Advertising Agency Copywriters are earning?

That’s why I was so intrigued when I received a “Dear Editor” email from Wendy Weber, President, Crandall Associates, with two marketing salary reports attached (the DMA directs inquiries about salaries to Crandall). I gave Wendy a call, and she was kind enough to share these guides – for free – with the MarketingSherpa audience. So, here they are:

• Direct Marketing National Salary Guide – Featuring dozens of job functions and the salaries they command, with regional variances taken into account.
• Online Marketing National Salary Guide – Featuring 21 job functions specific to online and ecommerce marketing.

“The guides were compiled using salary data from conversations with over 1,100 direct and online marketing professionals, including both hiring managers and job seekers,” Weber said. The executive search firm, which specializes in the direct and online marketing industry, chose not to conduct a mail survey, as they generally have a bias toward larger companies and are never random, as respondents select themselves.

So, aside from the fact that there is a Corporate Copywriter banking $135,000, what else can you learn from this data? Here are two points that stuck out (and we’d love to hear your takeaways as well):

• Digital marketing salaries continue to grow – The average annual salary for digital marketing positions has shown a steady increase, according to Weber. For example, the average salary for Web Analytics Manager has grown 2.8% since 2010 to $78,200.
• Optimization is a valuable skill – The top-paying Internet jobs require knowledge of optimization. For the VP of Online Marketing ($169,300-$198,200 with 7+ years experience), the job description calls for the ability to “manage and merchandise…site navigation and shopability, transaction processing, onsite promotion management…” And the Director of Ecommerce ($146,200-$168,700 with 7+ years of experience) specifically asks for “landing page optimization.”

In fairness, since we just announced our new Optimization Summit, I may have optimization on the brain – so I’d love to hear your takeaways as well.

Related Resources

Optimization Summit 2011 – June 1 -3

From Corporate America to Entrepreneur: Giving up steady pay for a steady say

Marketing Career: You must be your company’s corporate conscience

Marketing Career: Can you explain your job to a six-year-old?

“How to Become Indispensable to Your CEO” Special Report

MarketingSherpa Job Listings

MarketingExperiments Careers

“What we have here is…failure to communicate.”

Much like Cool Hand Luke, who heard this iconic line from his despotic warden after misunderstanding the prison’s stance on attempted escape, B2B dialogue that is not relevant to a target audience will ultimately prove to be a waste of effort, and a failure in communicating value.

As we all know, no matter how fast, inexpensively or well-targeted a B2B company maintains dialogue with customers or prospects, the success of each email, tradeshow, phone call and sales meeting depends on the relevance of the message.

But the challenge that you and the imperious prison warden share is – how do you create a relevant dialogue with a skeptical audience who has heard it all before?

Recently, I was reading through The B2B Refinery: An executive guide for improving Go-to-Market ROI through greater Sales and Marketing Efficiency, by J. David Green, Director of Best Practices – Applied Research, MECLABS and Michael C. Saylor, and they discuss this topic at length.

Though I can’t get into everything Green and Saylor cover about this topic in the book, one thing was certain after reading it — this is a complex question with an answer that is constantly changing. Or should I say evolving…

Evolve with the buying cycle

The information needs of the customer or prospect change as they move through the business buying cycle. For example, the more products and/or services that a customer buys from the vendor, the less information the customer generally requires.

However, a B2B company cannot address a buying cycle in isolation. Relevance is challenged by competitive B2B dialogue, which is cost-effective dialogue conducted with lucrative market segments that stems from competition. This compels vendors to find more efficient means of delivering relevant dialogue than through sales representatives

Of course, this abundance of information ultimately compounds the problem. Apart from mirroring the buying cycle, what are the key characteristics of relevant dialogue?

• The dialogue must take into account past interactions of the prospect: especially his explicit and implicit areas of interest — with the most recent interactions often mattering the most
• The customer or prospect must recognize the context of the communication

Instead of creating relevant dialogue, however, most marketing departments focus on universal messaging, giving less attention to relevance. While it makes sense to give advertising a consistent look and feel, these marketing practices fall short of the needs of business customers.

Buyers need an evolving, personalized story from a vendor. And like any good story, this one needs to have a defined beginning, middle and end, with each “chapter” addressing the interests of the audience. If a particular sale takes a significant period of time – perhaps even over multiple years – then the dialogue needs to last just as long, progressing naturally with the buying process.

To continue an analogy from earlier, branding and positioning are merely the movie poster and “glitz,” whereas integrated communication is the writing, acting and direction. Sure, branding and positioning matter. But they are no substitute for a well-told, relevant story.

Related Resources

Real-time Marketing: Don’t complain about the weather, put it to work

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

Members Library — Build Brand and Customer Loyalty Through One-to-One Communication: 7 Tactics

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing newsletter

Inbound marketing is growing in B2B companies. Investments in webinars, SEO, social marketing and page optimization are all on the rise, as noted in this chart from MarketingSherpa’s new 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

As inbound grows, more marketers are finding the right mix of tactics and channels for their companies. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but certain tactics are commonly reported as effective.

Below, we pulled stats from four charts in the benchmark report to highlight the most-effective tactics for B2B inbound marketing. Check out how the best tactics are interrelated.

Search engine optimization

• Most effective tactic: On-page content optimization

An effective SEO program is vital to an inbound strategy. Most B2B marketers research keywords and create great content about topics surrounding them. One of the most popular content platforms is the blog. Although blogging is not easy, many B2B companies have stuck with it (because it works).

Social media marketing

• Most effective tactic: Blogging

Blogging is the most effective B2B social marketing tactic. This ties directly to the popularity of blogs as a platform for publishing search-optimized content, as well as their ability to engage audiences.

Website optimization and design

• Most effective tactic: Using unique landing pages for campaigns
• Second-most effective tactic: Optimizing design and content for conversions

Inbound marketing can pull more visitors to your website — but visitors have to take action when they arrive. They have to download a report, subscribe to your newsletter, request to be contacted, etc. Otherwise the traffic is wasted.

This is why using unique landing pages for each campaign and optimizing them are the most effective tactics for B2B websites. The tactics reach into all facets inbound marketing and ensure your traffic is put to use.

You can find out a lot more about effective landing page optimization and design tactics at the upcoming MarketingSherpa 2011 Optimization Summit in June.

Pay-per-click advertising

• Most effective tactic: Creating highly-targeted ad groups
• Second most-effective tactic: A/B testing landing page content

Landing page testing is nearly tied for first as the most effective PPC tactic for B2B companies. This, again, illustrates that websites have to be designed to convert traffic that is generated by inbound marketing. Otherwise the traffic is wasted.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

MarketingSherpa 2011 Optimization Summit

Inbound Marketing: How to pull-in customers without pushing ads

Landing Page Optimization: Value-focused revamp leads to 188% lead gen boost, increase in personal interaction

MarketingSherpa: Subscribe to our Inbound Marketing newsletter

(Editor’s Note: When we first conceived of The Last Blog Post experiment, we thought it would be another way to learn from successful marketers and thought leaders. What we never imagined is how harrowingly close life can imitate marketing…as Scott explains in this post.

So while we’re a few weeks past The Last Blog Post experiment, I wanted to publish this one last insight since successful marketing must imitate life. And while, from my perspective, Scott has always had an impressive ability to understand people, businesses, processes and systems at their core, I believe his recent experience has further clarified that knowledge…)

Just prior to my 45^th birthday, our editor asked me to provide a contribution to a blog event titled “The Last Blog Post.” He stated the idea came from the concepts of the book entitled The Last Lecture,  that I had recommended to him.

As sharing things I have learned along the way is a passion of mine, I could not help myself but to say yes. My assistant, the best assistant anyone could ask for in the world I might add, argued that with my current focus and only two weeks lead time, there would be no way for me to complete the assignment on time. However, much to her chagrin, I took the task and added it to my long list.

The only thing I asked of our editor was that he provide me with some questions to get myself thinking along the direction he wanted this to trend, which he gratefully did. I carefully planned my writing time and set off to complete this assignment, as part of the many things I had taken on.

Little did I know that a few days later, on my 45^th birthday, I would get that wakeup call we all fear. Just after the kind group of people that I work with and serve presented me with some wonderful cupcakes and a gift, I realized that the constant pressure in my chest and shortness of breath would not go away. At first, I said, “Hey, it’s my birthday; I will deal with this tomorrow.”

But, thanks to Lisa, my wonderful persistent wife, I decided to give myself a different kind of present. I went to the hospital, just to get cleared, before I headed off to celebrate. Well, a few days later, which included having to be jump started (as my children called it) once along the way, thanks to the great care of the staff from the Jacksonville Heart Center and the Baptist Hospital, I got a second chance.

Now, with a new diet (thanks to my family and everyone at MECLABS ), some new pills and a few more cardiac procedures to go staring me in the face, I was told I did not need to worry about trying to hit the deadline to produce my Last Blog Post, since, well, I came all too close to it actually being my very last anything. So, I tried not to think about it and focus on catching up on my major projects. While I did not hit the deadline, I could not help but put a few of my thoughts on paper.

I wanted to focus on three areas in particular: 1) Good vs. bad people, 2) Short-term vs. Long-term approaches, and 3) Balancing work and life.

Good vs. bad people

With respect to good people vs. bad people (in fairness to my editor, the question as he posed it was more along the lines of what makes a good/bad leader and/or employee), I find it quite easy to state it this way. Most people are fundamentally good and it is simply their behavior that is bad.

More specifically, I define behavior that considers one’s own self-interest at the expense of other people’s interest as bad. The reality is that we are all guilty of “bad” behavior from time to time. The goal is therefore to prevent it first.

However, on those, hopefully rare, occasions when our behavior fits this definition of bad, it is incumbent upon us to admit it, apologize for it, make our penance and be darn sure we do not repeat the act. See a parallel to customer service and public relations here? I hope so.

At the end of all our days, the only thing that will really matter is the relationships we have and have had along the way.

Short-term vs. long-term approaches

We often hear people define others by whether they are thinking short term or long term in their strategy. Especially in today’s world, the short term, that is instant gratification, has become what we want.

However, I have watched people and businesses continue to fall flat on their faces with this short term approach because they lose their raison d’etre (the long term). What I try to help people understand is a simple adage that a mentor from my college days shared with me; don’t confuse fun with happiness.

He was not trying to say don’t go out and have fun. What he meant was – don’t let having fun get in the way of achieving the short term goals you needed to achieve in order to meet your long term objectives, which will leave you feeling fulfilled and happy.  For a deeper study of this concept, I recommend Spencer Johnson’s The Present and Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Likewise, a splashy advertising campaign is certainly fun, but is it serving your customers in the long term? Are you building a sustainable business or a flash in the pan?

Balancing work and life

The concept of working on short-term goals that will allow you to achieve your long-term objectives is how I build my approach to “balancing work and life.” Let me first explain that you cannot have “work-life balance” from my perspective. It makes the flawed assumption that your life and your work are two distinct and mutually exclusive entities. I argue that your work is a subset of your life, just as your family, schooling and time spent with friends are subsets.

The key to balancing them comes down to understanding the purpose you have dedicated your life to fulfilling and understanding how each of the pieces moves you closer to the life objective you have set out to achieve.

I will never forget the first short on the companion DVD to The 8^th Habit. It defined life with four key elements: living, loving, learning and leaving a legacy. There is no reason that work you do cannot contribute to your living, your loving, your learning and the legacy you leave behind.

Consider those elements in every campaign you create. Does that campaign represent your best efforts for both your company and your audience? After all, there is no “work you” and “home you.” There is only “you.” Ask yourself…do you, all of you, truly stand behind that latest campaign?

And in the end…

So, at the end of it all I will say that you simply have to do the following:

• Find a purpose that moves you and will improve the lives of others
• Understand how what you are doing today will help you to achieve that purpose and
• Realize that without other people to share our journey you may as well just stay where you are.

Related resources

Marketing Wisdom: In the end, it’s all about…

The Last Blog Post: Marketers must embrace change

The Last Blog Post: 5 Lessons I’d Leave Behind

The Last Blog Post- What Marketers can learn from The Last Lecture

The Last Blog: It All Begins with Trust

The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of Transparent Marketing

I’m a huge skeptic by nature. Moon landing? Pshh. More like a studio production in Houston. But, Karen Rubin really won me over with this talk at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit…

Our own Adam T. Sutton recently wrote about this topic on the MarketingSherpa blog – Email Marketing: An inbound tactic?

Skeptic that I am, I had Adam thoroughly tone down that post. I did not buy into email marketing as an inbound tactic.

“Bah, all vendors just try to show how everything they could possibly make money from fits into their branded word of the day. Now get me photos of that Spiderman!” I said in my best grumpy editor voice.

But, when Karen Rubin, Product Owner, HubSpot, spoke at Email Summit 2011, she said something that really made my ears perk up (about seven minutes into the above video)…

“Those house email lists, that’s really inbound marketing. When you think about it, those are people asking to hear from you. They want to get more information. So, you’re not interrupting them when you go in their inboxes.”

Inbound & Down

So, basically there are two opposing schools of thought circling around the Interwebs right now:

• “Email is dying” and on its way down
• Email marketing, at least when done right, is really inbound marketing – a hot and growing marketing tactic

Or perhaps both are true? List buying is dying, while house lists continue to be effective?

In your experience as a professional marketer, which statement do you think is the most true:

• Email is going the way of bell bottoms and Hammer pants
• Email marketing is a form of inbound marketing – hot, profitable, muy caliente
• Email marketing isn’t one thing – list buying is dying, but house lists are as profitable as ever (Kaching!)

(We welcome you to use the comments section and tell us which of the three statements you think is the most accurate and why)

Related resources

Optimization Summit 2011 – June 1 -3

Free MarketingSherpa Inbound Marketing Newsletter

Real-time Marketing: Crowdsourced video of keynote from MarketingSherpa Email Summit

MarketingSherpa’s 3rd Annual German Email Marketing Summit – March 21-22, 2011

Growing Email Lists with Social Media

The Role of Email Marketing in an Inbound Marketing World – Karen Rubin

So it’s early morning breakfast time at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas…day 2. Being the grumpy morning person I am, I’m just stumbling over to try to grab one of those tasting looking Danishes when our keynote speaker, David Meerman Scott, comes up to me very excited about a video idea, something that vaguely reminded me of the Beastie Boys.

Now, when a guy of David’s caliber has an idea, I want to hear it…and share it with you. Well, actually, let me just show you a trailer for what he came up with…

As I said when I introduced David at the Email Summit, we brought him in to help inspire marketers to take a fresh look at how they approach their marketing efforts. And kudos to David for holding himself to the same standard, breaking down the paradigm of what a professional speaker’s video could look like.

If you like the above trailer, feel free to watch the complete keynote speech, which was just released today.

As marketers, sometimes we get so tied up in a campaign mentality, a mode of working that dates back to the days of print and broadcast, of setting your marketing, days, weeks, even months ahead of time with no ability to make changes. In the age of the Internet and social media, David suggests you can no longer approach marketing in a “set it and forget it” fashion.

His keynote is a fitting example of the John Maynard Keynes quote, “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”

Related resources

MarketingSherpa MarketingExperiments Optimization Summit 2011 – June 1 -3

MarketingSherpa’s 3rd Annual German Email Marketing Summit – March 21-22, 2011

Real-Time Marketing: David Meerman Scott at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Awards

Email Marketing: Why should I help you?

In a recent blog post for our sister company MarketingExperiments, I shared my experiences at the fifth Design for Conversion Conference (DfC) in New York City. Today, I want to focus on a topic from Dr. Dan Goldstein’s presentation, and its relevance to usability and product testing for marketers — how focus group studies can effectively misrepresent true consumer preferences.

Asking you for your input on our Landing Page Optimization survey for the 2011 Benchmark Report has firmly planted the topic of surveys at the forefront of my thinking.

Calibration is not the whole story

The need to calibrate focus group data is well recognized by marketers and social scientists alike. The things marketers want to know the most – such as “intent to purchase” – is more obviously susceptible to misleading results. It’s easy to imagine that when people are asked what they would do with their money in a hypothetical situation (especially when the product itself is not yet available), naturally their answers are not always going to represent actual behavior when they do face the opportunity to buy.

However, mere calibration (which is a difficult task, requiring past studies on similar customer segments, where you can compare survey responses to real behavior) is not enough to consider. How we ask the question can influence not only the answer, but also the subsequent behavior, about which the respondent is surveyed.

Dr. Goldstein pointed me to an article in Psychology Today by Art Markman, about research into how “asking kids whether they plan to use drugs in the near future might make them more likely to use drugs in the near future.” Markman recommends that parents must pay attention to when such surveys are taken, and make sure that they talk to their children both before and after to ensure that the “question-behavior effect” does not make them more likely to engage in the behaviors highlighted in the surveys. The assumption is that if the respondent is aware of the question-behavior effect, the effect is less likely to work.

Question-Behavior Effect: The bad

If your marketing survey is focused on features that your product or service does not have—whether your competitors do or do not—then asking these negative questions may predispose your respondents against your product, without them even being aware of the suggestion. This is especially worrisome when you survey existing or past customers, or your prospects, about product improvements. Since you will be pointing out to them things that are wrong or missing, you run a good chance of decreasing their lifetime value (or lead quality, as the case may be).

Perhaps the survey taker should spend a little extra time explaining the question-behavior effect to the respondent before the interaction ends, also making sure that they discuss the product’s advantages and successes at the end of the survey. In short, end on a positive.

Question-Behavior Effect: The good

However, there is also a unique opportunity offered by the question-behavior effect: by asking the right questions, you can also elicit the behavior you want. This means being able to turn any touch point—especially an interactive one like a customer service call—into an influence opportunity.

I use the word “influence” intentionally. Dr. Goldstein pointed me to examples on commitment and consistency from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: Science and Practice, such as a 1968 study conducted on people at the racetrack who became more confident about their horses’ chance of winning after placing their bets. Never mind how these researchers measured confidence—there are plenty of examples in the world of sales that support the same behavioral pattern.

“Once we make a choice or take a stand, we will [tend to] behave consistently with that commitment,” Cialdini writes. We want to feel justified in our decision. Back in college, when I studied International Relations, we called it “you stand where you sit”—the notion that an individual will adopt the politics and opinions of the office to which they are appointed.

So how does this apply to marketing? You need to examine all touch points between your company and your customers (or your audience), and make a deliberate effort to inject influence into these interactions. This doesn’t mean you should manipulate your customers—but it does mean that you shouldn’t miss an opportunity to remind them why you are the right choice. And if you’re taking a survey—remember that your questions can reshape the respondents’ behaviors.

P.S. From personal experience, do you think being asked a question has influenced your subsequent behavior? Please leave a comment below to share!

Related Resources

MarketingSherpa Landing Page Optimization Survey

Focus Groups Vs. Reality: Would you buy a product that doesn’t exist with pretend money you don’t have?

Marketing Research: Cold, hard cash versus focus groups

Marketing Research and Surveys: There are no secrets to online marketing success in this blog post

MarketingSherpa Members Library — Are Surveys Misleading? 7 Questions for Better Market Research

As a longtime writer of both journalism and corporate communications, the idea of brand journalism is very interesting to me. I’ve worn both hats — media and marketing — and sometimes both at the same time. The two are very different, and require somewhat different skill sets and definitely different approaches. (Side note: I also sometimes do fiction, so in a way I’ve hit the content trifecta.)

Defining “brand journalism”

The idea is for companies to hire actual J-school trained journalists and give them free-reign to cover stories that involve topics of interest to the company’s customers and the general space of the business, but not exert any control over the story creation process, and certainly to not require — or even ask — the brand journalist to cover the company’s “story.” The brand journalist is to act as, well, a journalist.

Of course many veterans of copy desks, editorial rooms, city beats and magazine mastheads think of marketing as the “dark side,” and see going to work for a company as joining forces with Darth Vader, the Emperor, and the rest of the gang at the Death Star.

On the other hand, many journalists are in search of work in this tough media economy so there’s a lot of talented people out there to wheezily reach out to with an offer of doing real journalism, just doing it in a different setting.

Last week I had the chance to speak with one company that has taken the plunge into making brand journalism part of its marketing efforts.

Brand journalism in the real world

Nils Johnson is a co-founder of Beautylish, an online destination for trends and products in the beauty market. Nils just hired Ning Chao, former senior beauty editor at Marie Claire and InStyle, as the resident brand journalist for Beautylish.

From a marketing standpoint why did you decide to hire a brand journalist?

Nils Johnson: As a trusted expert in beauty, Ning [Chao] brings tremendous industry credibility to Beautylish which helps establish trust with brands and members. She also brings a strong editorial point of view to Beautylish. Having her provide expert insight to our users is integral in engaging our users in a long-term, meaningful way.

Will you exert any editorial control — either in assigning topics, editing or even killing pieces — over your brand journalist? If not, how does this content fit into your overall marketing strategy?

NJ: No, we will not assign any topics to her or edit any of her pieces. We may talk about topics to cover, but ultimately she makes the call on what she is going to cover. Ning [Chao] was the senior beauty editor for Marie Claire and InStyle, and writing for other top magazines for over a decade. We absolutely trust her judgment on what to write about.

In terms of how it fits into our marketing strategy, our site is focused on helping women discover new beauty trends and techniques. As an expert in the beauty industry, Ning [Chao] is responsible for helping to keep our readers up-to-date on what’s hot in beauty. Additionally we believe readers are more likely to follow and share high-quality editorial driven stories as compared to low-value SEO content that many sites are focused on producing.

It sounds like this is a relatively new effort so you probably don’t have any results to talk about right now. What sort of results are you looking for with this marketing effort? Do you have metrics you are going to watch, and if not how do you plan on tracking this initiative in brand journalism?

NJ: Our main metric is engagement. We want women to share and return to the content Ning [Chao] is directing. We’ll be monitoring engagement across social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, direct user interaction, and traffic numbers. Although Ning [Chao] only recently joined us we’ve already seen an increase in content sharing, brands engaging with our content via Twitter, and positive feedback from women that visit our site.

Related resources

Example of Ning Chao’s work at Beautylish, Hair Care Time-Saver: Cleansing Conditioner

Brand Journalism

User-Generated Video Contest: 6 Steps to Promote Brand and Generate New Marketing Content (Members’ library)

Brand Journalism: A Field Day for Web Marketers

Brand Journalism?

photo by: RogueSun Media